Branch campus leaders in Qatar insist that the diplomatic crisis in the Gulf is having limited impact on their universities as they prepare for the new academic year. Four Arab states — Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing it of funding terrorist groups. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have also ordered their citizens to leave Qatar.
Omran Hamad Al-Kuwari, executive director of the Qatar Foundation, which is the principal funder of Education City where most of the country’s branch campuses are located, says there were about 300 students from the blockading countries at institutions in the global education hub. In terms of staff, he says there were fewer than 30 in total from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and about 200 from Egypt.
However, Al-Kuwari says the impact of the crisis has been “almost none” in terms of operations and he did not expect student and staff numbers to be badly affected in the upcoming academic year. “As soon as the blockade started, we reached out to all students from blockading countries and confirmed to them that from our perspective they are welcome to come and to stay,” he says.
In cases where students have returned to their home countries over the summer holiday and are not able to return, the foundation is working to find “alternative solutions” for them to continue courses at institutions’ main campuses, says Al-Kuwari. According to Al-Kuwari, the branch campuses are in “high demand” and he is “confident that our history and performance will help us to get through this” in the long term.
Mehran Kamrava, director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Relations in Qatar, agrees that thus far the impact has been “minimal or none” because other Gulf countries have not been “fertile recruitment grounds” for Qatar. “The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries in general have competed with one another particularly in the field of education, so very few students come from other GCC states” to Qatar, he says.
But Christopher Davidson, reader in Middle East politics at Durham University, says he expects the campuses to start feeling the damage from the blockade by summer 2018. “By then no international student in his right mind would choose a branch campus in Qatar given the slew of negative reports about Qatar,” he says. “This will cause phenomenal damage to their reputation and viability.”